"YOU'RE A MURDERER."
He had looked at me with a desperation that felt like poison. "I'M NOT!" he'd cried. "Anna, please don't hate me. He's not dead. He's just sleeping. Believe me."
The words lodged in my skull like splinters. I remembered backing away until the walls were all around me, closing in like jaws. I remembered the animal sound that tore out of my throat when I called him what he was. I remembered the way he had stared after me as if the world had tilted off its axis and left him stranded, searching for some excuse that would let him live with what he had done.
Back in the present, the street wavered in my vision. My knees buckled, and I stumbled to the nearest lamppost, clinging to it as if it were the only solid thing left in existence.
I felt the tears before I understood I was crying, hot, determined trails carving down my cheeks. At some point, I'd taken a wrong turn; the narrow alley I'd chosen to shorten my route had stretched into a winding maze. My legs throbbed, but my mind barked orders and my body obeyed. Run.
Darkness pooled around me like ink. The city's distant lights were stretched thin across the sky, pale and far away. Only the rhythm of my breathing and the slap of my shoes on concrete marked the passing of time. Then, footsteps. Another pair, syncing with mine like a second heartbeat.
Panic handed me a burst of speed I didn't know I possessed. The world smeared past me; my lungs burned like they had been scraped raw. I didn't stop until the familiar gate of my colony rose ahead of me like a vow. Only when I crossed the threshold and stood behind the metal bars did I turn, chest heaving, to see if a shadow followed.
Nothing. Just an empty street and a torn trash bag tumbling in the breeze.
Relief didn't come all at once. It arrived in small, shivery waves that made my fingertips tremble. I fumbled with my keys, unlocked the door with clumsy urgency, and shut it behind me. The lock clicked. Then the bolt. Then the chain. I moved to the windows, closing every latch and pulling every curtain until the room was sealed off from the world, cocooned in fabric and silence.
These small rituals of safety were the only reason I was still standing. With each lock, each click, each rustle of the curtains, my breathing staggered its way back from ragged to almost steady. My hands were still shaking when I made it to the kitchen. The glass trembled in my grip as I filled it, water splashing against the counter, but I didn't care.
I drank until the burn in my throat faded and the pounding in my head softened to something dull and survivable. Only then did I realize how alone I was, how loud the silence had become when no footsteps followed me inside.
I couldn't face a shower yet, the sound of running water felt like a perfect cover for whatever might crawl out of the dark, so I wrapped a towel around myself and walked to my room. I didn't look at the windows. I didn't glance at the corners. My hand found the lock and turned it. The soft click felt like closing a vein. I rested my forehead against the wood and let the quiet press against me, just for a breath.
Then a voice, low, soft, devastatingly intimate, slipped into the room.
"Long time no see…"
Every muscle in me turned to stone. My heart collided with my ribs in a frantic rhythm. I hadn't heard the door open. I hadn't heard anything at all. The towel around me felt suddenly pathetic, a scrap of cloth between me and the thing wearing that voice.
"E-Edward?" The name scraped its way out of my throat. I knew the shape of my own fear.
He stepped forward from the shadow near the far wall as though he had grown out of it. The faint light from the hallway caught his features, sharpening his smile into something both familiar and wrong. He moved with the same unsettling blend of boyish pleading and predatory stillness I had seen before, the version of him that existed before the day my life cracked in two.
"I missed calling you that, Anna." His voice was syrup-sweet. "I waited so long. I made you wait, and I'm sorry."
He closed the space between us, slow and deliberate, savoring each step. Tears pricked the edges of my vision again, hot and raw. I tried to move, tried to create space, but my knees hit the edge of the bed and buckled. In that moment of stillness, of paralysis, he reached up and cupped my face.
His touch should have been soft. Instead, it felt like a verdict, warm, familiar, and invasive. He tilted my chin gently, as if examining a crack in porcelain, and the quiet rush of pleasure that flickered across his features at the contact made something in me revolt.
"You don't know how much I missed you," he murmured, savoring the word as if it were something he'd earned. He let his eyes flutter shut for just a second, his thumb coasting over my cheek as though the memory of my skin was something he'd rehearsed. "You don't know how much I missed touching you."
Something in my chest went deathly still. Instinct roared, shove him, scream, claw, but instead my hands found his wrist. Not to break his hold. Not with strength. Just a frozen, desperate push. He let go with the easy amusement of someone who assumed the ending was already written.
Air scraped into my lungs. "Get out," I said, the words brittle and small. It sounded like a dare whispered through chattering teeth.
He laughed, soft, delighted. "You don't mean that. You always say it and then you soften." His thumb brushed the line of my jaw as if stroking a memory. "Anna, don't be like that."
My gaze darted to my phone. It lay on the bedside table, too far, too exposed, and my hands were trembling so badly I couldn't trust them to reach it. The room felt smaller than it had before, shrink-wrapped around us like a glass case. He took another step, and the scent that followed him was a blend of sweat and something deceptively clean, like danger scrubbed in cologne.
"You shouldn't have run tonight," he murmured. "It makes the game more fun."
"Why are you here?" I forced out, each word jagged with panic. "Why did you come back?"
His smile sharpened, carving new edges into the boy I used to know. "Because you left a trail, Anna. Because you didn't stay away from those guys. And... I missed you." His free hand slid up to my throat in a slow, deliberate arc, a gesture so practiced it felt staged. Almost tender. Almost affectionate. That was the worst part, how he wielded menace the way others practiced love, as if rehearsing lines from a play only he remembered.
Every childhood memory of him , the stupid jokes, the afternoons at the swing set, the way he used to follow me around like a second shadow , folded in on itself and died. Whatever he had been back then was gone, rotted away beneath something darker. Now there was only the man who could walk into my most private space as if he'd been invited, as if the lock on my door meant nothing to him.
Rage cracked through the terror, sudden and blinding. Before I could second-guess it, I shoved him, harder than before. This time his back slammed against the wardrobe with a dull thud, and a startled sound escaped him, more disbelief than pain.
For one wild heartbeat, I believed I might outrun him. I saw it in my mind, darting past him, yanking the door open, sprinting barefoot down the hallway, down the stairs, out into the night, out of this life. I didn't care if the towel stayed or fell or if the neighbors saw me scream. I just wanted out.
But the hope lasted less than a breath.
He straightened with a slow, unhurried composure, rolling his shoulders as if he'd been mildly inconvenienced, not rattled. The smirk that followed made something cold burrow under my skin.
"You're still the same, so dramatic." His tone was sweet as poison. He took a step forward, then another, the confidence in his stride making the room feel smaller with every inch he reclaimed. His hand reached for me again, not to hurt, no, worse, to remind me he could take his time.
And beneath the fear, something else surfaced, the bone-deep terror of knowing that this time, no one knew he was here.
To be continued